"The Super Nintendo was mine," Brenne says of the raw material used for this NES-housed auxiliary amp. "I probably didn't have to rip apart mine that still worked, but how many times will I beat Super Mario again?"

After seeing video of a beer can turned into a guitar amp, Robert Brenne got inspired to try his hand at home-brewing his own custom music gear out of oddball parts.

A mid-20s pop-culture fan, Brenne tends to make amps that reflect his interests and personality. Browse his website and you’ll find amps made of vintage Nintendo gear and merchandise from the likes of Pac-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

“I like finding what someone had and really liked as a kid, like a Ghostbusters lunch box,” he told Wired. “Now that you’re older, you can’t really display it in your house, but as an amp it’s functional.”

Pairing that collector’s eye with DIY spirit, Brenne turned to the web, where you can find instructions for almost everything, from building a videogame in a box to making zombie makeup out of grocery store items. He stumbled onto RunOffGroove.com — in particular, plans for the Ruby amp circuit.

Then he took a quick soldering lesson from his father and got to work on his first amp.

“Building the circuit was very trial-and-error. When I first did it, I had a lot of buzzing but not a lot of guitar sound,” Brenne said. “I felt I was on the right track and I had to keep going. Once I finally got it, I thought, ‘If you can do it with a beer can, you can do it with anything.'”

Brenne built amp after amp, eventually turning his new hobby into a business. Now his shop, Artistic Amplification, offers custom-built guitar or auxiliary amps made from virtually anything, ranging from decorative vases to Sesame Street paraphernalia.

What Portlandia‘s Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are to pickling, Brenne is to amplification.

Brenne’s played guitar for more than 10 years and finds that every DIY amp produces a unique tone, with wood amps sounding very different from those made of metal or plastic. (Compare the sound of his cigar box amp to the tone of one made from a Ghostbusters thermos.)

For every amp, he said he seeks out something that is unique and visually appealing to use as a base. Some source material he receives from donors; other items he finds at thrift stores, antique sales or even lying around his house. No matter an amp’s point of origin, they’re all fitted with the Ruby circuit.

Build times vary. An easy-to-retrofit item might take two or three hours to convert, while more complicated projects can take eight hours.

A rotary phone contains a lot more interior material to work around or remove than a cigar box, for example, and if an item possesses some unique characteristics, Brenne does his best to maintain that functionality. (His rotary phone amp’s handset serves as a speaker.)

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